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‘’Nightcrawler’’: A Different Look At Gyllenhaal and L.A.

Friday, October 24, 2014

The pulsating shimmer of Los Angeles at night can seem either like a
dreamscape fantasia or a topography of nightmares. In the new film “Nightcrawler” it is both, a land of
opportunity and madness and left in some measure for the viewer to
unravel.

The
directing debut for Dan Gilroy, who also wrote the screenplay, the film enters
the world of nighttimes crime-scene videographers as a jumping-off point to
explore contemporary media culture, self-created personalities in the Internet
age and the boundaries of personal ambition

As the
film opens, Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal
in a transformative performance) is adrift on the fringes of society, stealing
scrap to sell at salvage yards. After seeing a freelance video news team swoop
in during the aftermath of a freeway car crash, he sets a new goal for himself.
The right person finding the right opportunity that fits his specific pathology
just so, Bloom makes a quick study of his new profession, while encountering a
more established competitor (Bill Paxton), an overnight-shift television news
producer (Rene Russo) desperate to
make a mark and a hapless tag-along assistant (Riz Ahmed). Bloom’s rise comes with no minor cost and a small body
count.

The
enigmatic character of Bloom, stubborn, self-taught, self-made and possibly
sociopathic, and personified by Gyllenhaal’s full-throttle performance, makes
“Nightcrawler” many things at once. It is a character study, a disturbing look
at the impact of media and culture, a fascinating glimpse into the nocturnal
life of Los Angeles and an unpredictable, pulse-quickening thriller.

“I didn’t look at Lou as a deranged, damaged
person,” said
Gilroy. “I really wanted to look at a
person who doesn’t have the programming and support from childhood and has
limited tools to survive. To me the through-line of the character was somebody
trying to survive in today’s world”.

“And the problem, as much as it’s Lou, is the
world that he sprang from and the world that rewards him. We adamantly tried to
never make judgments on anything in the film. We never say [the problem is]
Lou, we never say it’s TV news. We were trying to get something that felt real,
that felt topical, that felt current, that had a relevance to people’s lives.”

Gilroy
started with an interest in the crime photographer of the 1930s and ’40s known
as Weegee and then began to learn of the contemporary world of news
videographers who refer to themselves as “nightcrawlers.” Connecting these
together was a long fascination with what he called the “kabuki theatre” of
local L.A. news.

Gilroy
is a longtime screenwriter who among other credits wrote on “The Bourne Legacy”
along with his brother, director and writer Tony Gilroy, who is also a producer
on “Nightcrawler.” The film was edited by Dan Gilroy’s twin brother, John. (Dan
Gilroy is also married to Russo.)

In
crafting a specific vision for Los Angeles, cinematographer Robert Elswit (an
Oscar winner for “There Will Be Blood”) shot nighttime scenes with a digital
camera and daytime scenes with a 35mm film camera. The production took place at
more than 70 locations around L.A. on a 29-day shoot, including 22 night shoots
in a row.

Gilroy
noted that for him, Gyllenhaal’s gaunt look in the film reduces his face to
angular planes that catch light in different ways, shifting between handsome
and grotesque. Gyllenhaal evokes the hungry demeanour of a coyote — “Lou is a nocturnal predator who comes down
from the hills at night to feed,” Gilroy said — and the film’s vision of
Los Angeles is also meant to capture the city’s interface with nature that many
films overlook.

“The
Los Angeles I usually see on film is the Los Angeles that’s man-made, downtown
and freeway world,” said Gilroy. “I
always responded to the wild, untamed aspect of Los Angeles. To me, it’s a
place of mountains and oceans. It functions like a little island surrounded by
wilderness.”

Production
designer Kevin Kavanaugh spent many nights just driving around Los Angeles
looking for places that captured the feel of the city after the sun goes down,
specific nondescript strip malls, Lou’s apartment on a hilly street not far
from Dodger Stadium or the glass box Chinese takeout place that resembles a
fish tank and is a key location for the story. The more commonly filmed
downtown area was largely avoided.

“We wanted to get away from the metropolitan
feel of L.A.,” said Kavanaugh, “to really get into the low-lying hills and
more of the surrounding areas of Los Angeles. Dan and I had a lot of
discussions on how to treat downtown, the Emerald City in the background. You
can’t ignore it, it’s a beautiful skyline at night, so let’s treat it like a
distant element, a kind of centre point that everything happens around it.”